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The Importance of 'Getting Religion': Adverb 7
The Importance of 'Getting Religion': Adverb 7
The Importance of 'Getting Religion': Adverb 7
Your newsletter will keep your organisation ‘top of mind’ with your clients,
potential clients and centres of influence.
And your newsletter will enable you to maintain an enduring and intimate
relationship with your marketplace.
Or will it?
How do you know that subscribers will actually bother to read your
newsletter? They are busy people, after all.
What’s to stop them hitting ‘delete’ each time your periodical arrives in their
inboxes? Or worse still, pressing ‘reply’ with that dreaded ‘unsubscribe’ word
in the subject line?
But what’s the mark of great content? How should you select this content?
How should you package it? And how can you ensure that you can keep
producing quality content after the second, the tenth, or the one-hundredth
edition of your newsletter?
Our belief is that great content is more than simple information, education or
instruction.
Ask yourself, would Permission Marketing, Seth Godin’s runaway best seller,
have been the hit it was if it had just preached textbook marketing practices?
In each case, this higher cause has transformed what would otherwise have
been an interesting concept into a religion (at least, in the more general
sense of the word).
The real significance of this infectiousness is the impact it has on the ROI
(return on investment) of your marketing activities. If you can successfully
‘start a religion’, the return on your marketing investment will increase
exponentially over time. This is in contrast to the diminishing returns we see
from most product-centric sales processes in mature markets.
We’ve created a simple six-step process you can follow to start your own
religious movement. The starting point for this process is your basis for
communication.
Typically, your basis for communication consists of expertise that you have
acquired as a by-product of the delivery of your core product or service.
For example, an office furniture retailer may establish relationships with its
marketplace by sharing its workplace design expertise with clients, potential
clients and centres of influence. (This firm’s market may not have an
enduring interest in our office retailer’s range of workstations but it is likely
to have an ongoing interest in improving workplace productivity.)
It seems there’s always a better way. No matter what industry we consult to,
we always hear the same thing: ‘standard practice is fundamentally flawed’.
Once you’ve done that, you can outline your better way.
Your better way can describe the optimal process. Alternatively, it can
describe the process that should be followed in order to design the optimal
process.
It’s interesting to note that, neither Ricardo Semler (Maverick) nor Michael
Gerber (The E-myth) gave their management methodologies names. I
suspect their methodologies would have been more infectious had they taken
this next step.
As well as naming your better way, you should also assign a name to the
standard practice. (You can see how Godin has done this in the example
above.)
It’s also worth developing your own terminology (when appropriate). When I
attend meetings with potential clients, I often notice that they use
Relationship-centric Marketing terminology. They do this because they have
become sold on our ideology as a result of their exposure to AdVerb and our
events.
We once received a request for a proposal from a potential client where the
project brief was sprinkled with our own terminology. This document had
been circulated to two or three other consultancies. Our potential client was
kind enough to provide a link to our Website to enable our competitors to
decipher the brief! Needless to say, we won the work.
Now that your ideology has a name, a model and its own set of terminology,
it’s time to commit it to print.
The purpose of your manifesto is to argue the case for your ideology. Nothing
more, and nothing less.
One of the best manifestos I have ever come across is a book called The
Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt. The Goal is a gripping ‘business novel’ about
manufacturing process design. It does a superb job of selling Goldratt’s
contrarian process design methodology, the Theory of Constraints. The Goal
has sold over two million copies, a remarkable feat for any business book —
particularly one about manufacturing process design.
Now that you’re armed with a manifesto, it’s time to start spreading the
word.
In reality, this undertaking isn’t as ominous as it may sound (no, you’re not
required to don a suit and spend Sundays knocking on doors!)
You simply need to redirect your promotional resources from the promotion
of your organisation to the evangelism of your ideology.
Step one is to attract ‘followers’ with the offer of your manifesto. And step
two is to build an intimate relationship with ‘followers’ by subscribing them to
Acquiring ‘followers’
You’ll find that a magical thing happens when you begin promoting your
manifesto. People actually respond to your promotional campaigns!
While campaigns that promote your organisation are unlikely to yield much of
a response, an advertisement for a discussion paper that advocates a new,
better way can easily generate one hundred or more replies.
Now, if you’re worried that this promotional approach will fail to deliver the
brand building benefits of traditional campaigns, you shouldn’t be. The reality
is that the promotion of your ideology will do more for your brand than
traditional self-congratulatory advertisements ever could!
Each communication should focus on one facet of your ideology and explore
its implementation in detail.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that your search for compelling newsletter content
has lead to the development of a complete marketing program. You could
call this marketing program an ideology-based marketing strategy — or you
could simply call it getting religion!
The idea of making your ideology the industry standard seems counter-
intuitive. This is because I’m advocating that you give it away!
Specifically, I’m suggesting that you encourage channel partners — and even
competitors — to join your religion.
Ask yourself, would Stern Stewart & Co have ever been able to make their
Economic Value Added (EVA) the financial standard that it is today, if it was
the only consulting firm to advocate it?
This last step isn’t really about starting a religious movement; it’s about
extending the life of your movement.
You can extend your standard by showing your followers how your ideology
can be applied to other areas of their businesses or lives. I mentioned the
Theory of Constraints (TOC) previously. Although this theory initially related
just to production, Goldratt has subsequently applied it to finance, project
management, marketing, management and other business functions.